Take Oakland, California’s MaryClare Brzytwa — an acclaimed flutist whose music often blends her preferred instrument with a sack full of odd electronics to create haunting soundscapes. Her songs are warped journeys through twisted pathways of noise that explore and test boundaries on a whim. The flute, as played by Brzytwa, is an instrument that can quickly jump from a tortured nightmare to softly drifting lullaby. The California artist adds another layer of surrealism to her work with the help of strange sound effects that tease out the otherworldly aura of her music. It is an unnerving cocktail of beauty and dreamlike melody.

— Philadelphia Northeast Times: Master Artist Rental Car

Flutist, vocalist, electronic musician, now based in Switzerland, via Oakland, via Cleveland. She’s a pretty scary/awesome artist and improviser in her own right. I was really sold after hearing her perform solo torch-noise behind a microphone, keyboard and computer screen with the most colorful Max layout I’d ever seen. Later, I learned of her association with folks like Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins and Joelle Leandre, but here’s a list of people I think should seek her out ASAP: Kate Bush, Maja Ratkje, Meredith Monk, Mike Patton, John Zorn, Britney.

Berthiaume out of Montréal and MaryClare Brzytwa from Mills College create a garden of delights for listeners looking to be challenged and soothed in the same spectrum. A first-order recording of flute, guitar and laptop voyages that could lead to an out of body experience. The space between drone and experimental soundscapes is the galaxy these partners in para-normal sounds traverse. A quiet revolution unfolds from the abandoned forms of composition, exploratory in purpose yet quite sensible in texture. Many laptop layer cakes collapse like soufflé but Berthiaume and Brzytwa make it happen like master chefs having a chat while prepping decadent delicacies. Even the space between sounds takes on significant meaning and function, truly a magnificent and important contribution to the undomesticated sounds of experimentation.

— KFJC On-Line Reviews: Bebe Donkey

MaryClare Brzytwa makes noises spanning electronic blips to manipulated flute solos to sparse piano/vocal pieces that sound like the show tunes of the damned, conceived by someone chained up in Sondheim’s basement.

— Philadelphia City Paper: Master Artist Rental Car

The guitarist Antoine Berthiaume and the flautist MaryClare Brzytwa (also on electronic instruments) present a disc of improvisation and sampling not at all idiomatic and on the contrary, very eccentric and diverse: If Bebe Donkey and Was Named do not wander too far from the norm of the field, After is a surprising mute ballad, Who Is Really a digression of out-rock, Girl from Philadelphia an exercise techno-microwave, By the Name of a splendid mutation of rock-blues and She Also caresses the field. The idea – and the realization – of a ‘container’ capable of collecting very diverse ideas redirecting them in the language of improv is applaudable. 

— Blow Up ,116, Italy: Bebe Donkey

Here’s an interesting paradox. Music by Antoine Berthiaume (Montreal, guitar effects) and MaryClare Brzytwa (Cleveland, Ohio, flutist and manipulative computer effects) is generally composed of artificial elements. It rarely heard of the strings or blowing into the flute. Rather, it is a sound magma moving in front of our ears on this album.Yet this music is surprisingly alive! It breathes, it moves, it is organic! The series of improvisations that have delivered the two musicians unfolds as clouds atmosphere that could be compared visually to the movement of a magic bench fish or a swarm of insects: it teems in all meaning, you can hear lots of small details, but it is this mass movement that is exciting and captivating to listen.We can only concentrate on the mechanical aspect of the sequences used and the beauty of sound (After), but it is taking a step back and letting himself be carried by all of those elements that really takes his foot. One piece is more sound. Berthiaume Brzytwa and reveal them more natural réverbérée flute and guitar chords dry effects. The only exception that transports us into a world mid-new age, mid-Sigur Ros, Baby on the Donkey. Otherwise, it’s a space that transports us. Great success! 

The flute is one of the actors in From The Tale of Pigling Bland, a disc of radical improv which is an ensemble of four elements involved in some combinations ranging from duo to quartet, flute, sax-flute-cello-sax -piano.You should already know the four musketeers, plus there are Maryclare Brzytwa, Guazzaloca Nicola, Marraffa Edoardo and Francesco Guerri, names that are in themselves a guaranteed certificate. And, needless to say, From The Tale of Pigling Bland is a quite interesting disc. There seems little, since in one area, such as radical dell’impro played on traditional instruments, and in which much more has been said, it is extremely unlikely to be able to go beyond the boundaries of a lot interesting. Unique in, if they consider such, some concessions too virtuosity.

— Sands-zine (Italy): From the Tale of Pigling Bland

Descent into the uterus of female creativity, child birth’s appropriate to say. Two female protagonists of the avant-Italian, Patrizia Oliva and IOIOI and MaryClare of California, School Mills College. The matrix and industrial-electronic and psychedelic ritual contaminates for you, while the vocal approach moves between form-song experimentalelectro-acoustic and contemporary music, metabolizing and also ethnic. Sensual magic, suffered and carnal behind all kinds of conception (7)

— Blow Up (Italy): Gravida

Maybe electrified female angst and all the beautiful things that spring from it floats youre kayak. Then Oakland local MaryClare Brzytwa (‘brist wahh’, Polish) will transport you to netherworlds containing dark and twisty dimensions using a looped flute and custom computer programs that turn her devices into automaton improvisers, with a twist.

— San Francisco Weekly: Live performance review

This is Montreal-based guitarist, Antoine Berthiaume’s third disc for the AM label and each one has been great and completely different. His first was a duos disc with Fred Frith and Derek Bailey, which showed him to be a strong improviser to match wits with two older and legendary figures and guitar icons. His next was a trio with Quentin SirJacq on piano and Norman Teale on electronics and again it showed another side of intense improv. For his third AM CD, he employed a jazz guitar trio, which showed how well Antoine could play modern jazz guitar. Bebe Donkey is once more, another departure, as it features a fine duo with MaryClare Brzytwa on flute and electronics. The title track begins with the samples of scratchy records and some eerie, floating drones. In a blindfold test, one would be hard-pressed to figure out who is playing which instrument as most of the sounds are electronic sounding, static-like and filled with glitches and other odd sound effects. There is a great attention to detail here which reminds me of discs on the Erstwhile label, quieter, electronic based improv carefully created. The twelve song titles really make up just a few sentences of text and I get the feeling that this duo is creating a series of short stories that unfold one section at a time, yet somehow feel linked by an underlying thread or subtext. A marvelous collection of sonic manipulations 

— Downtown Music Gallery: Bebe Donkey

Meeting Derek Bailey in 2002 was a key experience for guitarist Antoine Berthiaume, but a semester at Mills College with Fred Frith and Joëlle Léandre shifted his perspective once again. In Oakland he met flautist and laptop electronic player MaryClare Brzywta, who seems to have metamorphosed out of a wormhole in Riot Grrrls in Wonderland. Born in 1981 in Youngstown, Ohio of very strict Polish Catholics, MC is razor sharp Queen of the B-Bands: in Bolivar Zoar with Ava Mendoza and Theresa Wong halfway between apes and angels, or as Mendoza would put it, between Bo Diddley and Hildegard von Bingen; as Byznich she sets up alone on stage as Mysti Marie Theater (?); and in Slow, Children she improvises Electronics with kotoist Kanoko Nishi and drummer Shayna Dunkelmann. From which it should be clear why Carla Kihlstedt has invited her to Music Unlimited 21 in Wels. Meanwhile the MySpace wormhole let me slide over to the Norman Conquest, a trio of NT with QS and AB (see Bad Alchemy 47). Rapidly shaken through the MySpace centrifuge, I finally end up landing on Bebe Donkey, named after the Donkey Punch Who is Really A Roller Derby Girl from Philadelphia. B and B here appear to be putting in their application for one of those acousmatic grants that you only get when you take noise seriously. Any suspicion of quirky pop, women power, or anti-Bush politics, ubiquitous in the Oakland scene, is here polished away by shimmering guitar drones or sound squirted out by a laptop as if splattering an abstract painting. Gnarled clicks, spotty interference, and peevish distorted waves swoosh by, once in a while with a breath of flute or a wheezy voice, until ‘Punch’, with elegiac delicacy and plucked guitar, looks us unexpectedly in the eye. And minutes later ‘She also’ provides the only grating and elegant moment with organ-like melodrama. As a finale ‘Alitron’ closes with an intoxicating homage to Derek Bailey.

Maryclare Brzytwa is a shaman, but I’m not sure if what she sees and passes on is something that will save, doom, or merely shake the listener. Actually, being shaken is rarely a mere event, and “Stairwells” is no comfortable way for armchair gloomies to get any morose fuel for their despair. The four tracks, or Steps, of the EP are harrowing and uncompromising. We don’t really know why she has taken us to a place of horror, but it is hard to stop listening, just in case there is solid ground. There is none. From the distorted flute instrumental “Step 1,” through the next two steps’ focus on Brzytwa’s chanting and howling interaction with that flute, to the twelve-minute or so “Step 4,” the closer that weaves together voice, industrial pulse (courtesy of guest Travis Johns) finally chaotic noise, the improvisations of “Stairwells” do not so much provide access to anything more than that dark, haunted room we never leave throughout. These are powerful steps to nowhere but deeper into a landscape that calls for catharsis. Obviously the signposts here are Diamanda Galas, Suicide and Carla Bozulich, but Maryclare Brzytwa carves her own niche in the experimental search for relief from suffering through pure sound. “Stairwells” is not an easy listen, but most good medicine goes down rough, and this is sonic purge if there ever was one.

— Foxy Digitalis: Stairwells

An album featuring an acoustic free improvisation session between three Italians (Guazzaloca on piano, Marraffa on sax, Guerri on cello) and MaryClare Brzytwa on flute and vocals. Ambient sound recording, no bells or whistles, for a captivating performance dominated by Brzytwa’s presence, especially her striking screams. Nice playing, nice intensity, music that is visceral despite its abstract gestures.

— François Couture: From the Tale of Pigling Bland

The technical data on the disc stresses that the recording was made within an afternoon, with a digital field recorder, and without the aid of any electronic device. Observation particularly appropriate because from the first notes of the soundscape. From The Tale of Pigling Bland seems populated by electronic unidentified objects, which roam undisturbed through the sound space. But they are nothing but vibrations from the strings of the cello case and of Francesco Guerri, nebulous escape from Edward Marraffa saxophones, cascades of crystal Guazzaloca erupted from the piano, impossible frequencies emitted by the vocal Maryclare Brzytwa. The landscape that is created is something surreal, indefinite, and sometimes disturbing, the musicians show great knowledge about the tools and ability to react / interact with the stimuli that produce sounds in real time. But, at the end of listening, one can not change the subject from a questionnaire vexata decisive. It makes sense to fix on a hard radical improvisational performance so tied to real-time, instant execution, visual appearance, bodily gestures of his characters and their interaction with the public? Question that is difficult to answer but there is no doubt that the music presented on disc by four musicians lose some of its explosive power and, perhaps, its very raisond’etre.

“... From the Tale of Pigling Bland “is the title of the first albums that the quartet formed by Edoardo Marraffa, Guazzaloca Nicola Francesco Guerri and Maryclare Brzytwa recorded at the School of Popular Music Ivan Illich,where the singer and flautist U.S. has on several occasions made known its performance. Since 2008, Bologna became a stage that will lead to regularmeetings with different formations extended to other important representativesof the improvisational scene hinterland, as with the cellist Tristan Honsinger.Marraffa, and Guerri Guazzaloca long collaborated in teaching the SPM IvanIllich, improvisation and are members of an environment that naturallytranscends national boundaries. The quartet’s music is primarily improvised, full of narrative inventions and solutions unusual timbre, created without compromise. “

— Radio Città Fujico, Pierantonio Pezzinga, “Intersezioni”: From the Tale of Pigling Bland

Lindstrøm hits the ground running, clipping a short phrase into an insistent riff, slowly adding layers both original and inherent to the mounting sonic stew until any number of unexpected melodies collide and divide. About halfway in, the song vamps out into a flamboyant retro-strut, and later – when Leone and Brzytwa’s vocals, flutes and trumpets enter for the climatic two minute send-off – the song completely lays itself open, sounding unlike anything to ever grace a Boredoms disc.

— In Review Online : Boredoms, Super Roots 10

Another CD in the series ‘the many sides of Antoine Berthiaume’. In 2003 Berthiaume debuted with ‘Soshin’ a cd of duets with Fred Frith and – just on time – with Derek Bailey. Followed by ‘Leaves and Snows’, a trio with Quentin SirJacq on piano and Norman Teale on electronics, showing again improvisation from another angle. With Michel Donato and Pierre Tanguay, Berthiaume released a jazz album: ‘Ellen’s Bar’. For his newest collaboration Bertiaume takes again another route, combining improvisation with soundscaping. He is joined now by MaryClare Brzytwa on flute and electronics, making use of electronic and sampled sounds. She is a new name for me. Brzytwa studied improvisation with Joelle Leandre, composition with Fred Frith, etc. She is member of the all female free improvisation outfit Slow Children. Berthiaume plays guitar and effects, in a way that is often difficult to trace the guitar in the soundscapes they paint. Together they produce an album of quiet electronic based improvisations. At times even very ambient, like in the track ‘Punch’. In a track like ‘By the Name’ they came close to the songformat. In the last track ‘Alltron’ Berthiaume plays in Bailey-like way, accompanied by environmental sounds coming from Brzytwa. In all the pieces the input of both is blended carefully and successfully into one whole of organic soundmanipulations. I would say this is a very interesting and engaging work that should interest those who are into crossovers between improvisation and sound manipulation.